April 21, 2021
What it’s really like to own a restaurant right now
A day in the life of High Tide Hospitality’s Paul Manley
On an early April Sunday, a team dismantled most of the wooden barriers and picnic tables that had lined Plaza Midwood’s Thomas Street since last September, then loaded them into a U-Haul. The change signaled a joyful return to normalcy, but Charlotte’s crowded patios and booked reservations belie some of the hospitality industry’s more dismal details. In back offices, local restaurant owners are still grappling with a complex set of challenges, such as recruiting staff, managing federal aid, and negotiating with landlords for more flexibility in rent payments.
One of those restaurateurs is Paul Manley. He and business partner Andrew Chapman own High Tide Hospitality, which operates Sea Level NC in Uptown, The Waterman in South End, and Ace No. 3 in Belmont, Concord Mills, and — soon — Myers Park. The day after Thomas Streatery was taken down, Manley spoke to me from a job fair at The Waterman, where his staff aimed to fill 21 open positions companywide. By the time we hung up, about an hour and a half after the fair started, just three people had shown up.
Here’s a typical day for Manley as he weathers the strange final months of the coronavirus pandemic.
6:30 a.m. Manley’s workday can last 12 hours or more, so he takes advantage of the early morning for personal pursuits. “I get up at 6:30 and take care of myself,” he says. “Carve out some physical time, exercise and yoga, or taking it easy—read the paper, get some news.”
8:00 a.m. Manley typically begins the workday with administrative tasks. About once a month, when rent comes due for the Sea Level NC space in Uptown, Manley negotiates, usually via email, for flexibility from the landlord, Truist. “It’s really difficult as a small-business owner to get the decision-makers in front of you,” he says. “Our little first-floor retail spot is not necessarily a high priority.”
Sea Level NC closed its doors in early March last year, around the time business in Uptown evaporated. Office workers stayed home, and the events that usually draw diners to the neighborhood were canceled or postponed. The seafood restaurant tried to pivot to to-go options, but they didn’t really reopen until late July.
These days, basketball fans are making their way back to Hornets games and employees are gradually returning to their offices, but Manley is still negotiating back rent. “We’re just trying to find an equitable deal that helps us with the losses that we’ve incurred and giving some breathing room to the business moving forward, until the neighborhood of Uptown is able to fully recuperate.”
9:00 a.m. Fallout from the pandemic has also thrown High Tide Hospitality’s vendors into turmoil—and they still haven’t bounced back. Manley says wine and liquor distribution has been especially difficult. Lots of wines have been discontinued, and the fluctuating situation meant Manley and his staff had to spend substantial time revising their menus and wine lists. “If you go out and there’s an expansive wine list, you could probably anticipate a large amount of that being not available right now,” Manley says. “Or having a bourbon list, and the bourbon’s made, but the bottles never showed up because the bottles were made overseas and the shipping lanes were shut down. All that stuff is just a chain reaction.”
So Manley spends part of his mornings wrangling vendors. As he prepares to open a third Ace No. 3 location in Myers Park this spring, he’s been negotiating for a particular to-go bag for the burger brand. Because of COVID disruptions, the process has dragged on for a full year. But despite the mutual challenges, Manley says, “I always look at it as a partnership.” He goes out of his way to build relationships with the vendors’ local representatives, and he often opts to talk on the phone or invite them to his restaurants.
10:00 a.m. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for PPP,” Manley says. But the two rounds of funding he received have their own administrative hurdles, which come in waves. To apply for the program, he and his administrator had to spend a “tremendous amount of time” to figure out the complex process and submit the materials on schedule. These days, he’s about halfway through the process of getting the first round forgiven, which means “a lot of reports, a lot of filling out forms, talking to bankers, all that kind of stuff.”
Paul Manley at his restaurant Sea Level NC in Uptown. Photo by Peter Taylor
1:00 p.m. Around midday, Manley takes a break to exercise. He’s an avid cyclist, and he spends road rides brainstorming. (“If I’m mountain biking, I’m just thinking, I don’t want to crash.”) This is when he does high-level thinking about the direction of the company — ”how do we grow responsibly, how do we grow and be good employers and a good restaurant company, and be responsible to the neighborhoods that we do business in?” — but also comes up with specific ideas, which he’ll bounce off Chapman when he gets back to work. One recent idea that came out of a bike ride was a dedicated to-go window for the new Ace No. 3 in Myers Park.
2:00 p.m. When I spoke to Manley, he was attending an afternoon job fair at The Waterman in South End. While much of the public is eager to get back into dining rooms, Manley believes many former hospitality workers are less enthused about returning to restaurants. His company employs about 120 people across all three restaurant concepts, and for the last several weeks, he’s had more than 20 openings for front-of-house and back-of-house positions.
He and HR manager Mallory Rose have had to come up with new ways, like the job fair, to attract staff, and Manley says Rose now spends about 90 percent of her time just on recruiting. The company transitioned to Jobalign, an online application and onboarding system, and began spending significant sums to post on Indeed. But applications have been slow to come in, especially for kitchen jobs, even though the company now offers higher salaries than in pre-COVID times.
While Manley attributes the shortage partially to the stimulus and generous unemployment benefits, he believes the bigger problem is that many hospitality workers have left the industry altogether. (Meanwhile, he points out, there are plenty of undocumented people who need the work — but he’s not legally allowed to hire them.) Much of the workforce, he says, went to work in other blue-collar jobs — landscaping, transportation, construction, Amazon — during the pandemic, and they’re not especially motivated to return to a field that burned them so badly last spring. “We as an industry,” he says, “have to woo them back.”
4:00 p.m. Three or four days a week, after a full day of work in the office, Manley heads out to his restaurants. He monitors the quality of the food and service, coordinates with his management and chef teams on day-to-day operations, and assesses cleanliness and general hospitality. But when the restaurant is busy and short-staffed, he doesn’t just watch. “This past Saturday, I was the silverware roller and the barback for about three hours,” he says. “Sometimes you just have to roll up your sleeves and get in there.”
9:00 p.m. On his way home, Manley sometimes drops by other local restaurants to get a sense of what his peers and competitors are up to. He tries to stay in touch with fellow restaurateurs, especially those in Uptown, who face a unique set of challenges. During the pandemic, they frequently commisserated by phone or text. Just as he did before COVID, Manley gets home between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. and hangs out with his wife, Genia, for a while before getting ready for bed. “I’m usually pretty braindead by the time I get done,” he says. “I’ll usually have a nice bourbon nightcap — and sleep soundly every single night.”
